Sunday, June 28, 2015

When I was in
college my Old Testament professor used to say, ‘the rest of the Bible speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us’. I think this is true, and I’m
really glad that we use them week by week in our Anglican worship.

The Book of Psalms
is a book of prayers written by Old Testament people; some of them perhaps date
as far back as the time of David, a thousand years before Jesus, while others
are more recent. In the psalms we’ll find the whole breadth of human experience
and emotion – joy and suffering, praise and anger, love and hate – every part
of our human life, even the nasty parts, all presented to God in prayer. I hope
you’re getting to know the psalms, and I hope you read them regularly.This extraordinary collection of
prayers is telling us that every part
of our human life can be prayed; there’s no experience, and no emotion, that
can’t be brought up in our conversations with God. The psalms invite us to behonest and to beourselves in our prayers. God knows all about us anyway, so we may
as well tell him the truth!

Today’s psalm,
Psalm 130, is definitely speaking for us in our troubles. It speaks of a painful
aspect of our human experience, when we say to ourselves, “I’m in trouble, and
it’s my fault: I’m the one that
caused it”. So we’re not only dealing with despair and difficulty, but guilt as
well. If we’re religious people, we may find ourselves thinking “God must be
punishing me for what I did”.

This was a
common view in Old Testament times: the idea that if you were suffering, you
had obviously done something wrong, and God was punishing you for it. I say
this was a common Old Testament view, but of course it’s still with us; we
still hear people who are going through hardship asking, “What have I done to
deserve this?”

But even in
the Old Testament not everyone agrees with this, and when we turn to the New
Testament we come across a completely different view. In John chapter 9, Jesus’
disciples looked at a man who had been born blind, and they asked Jesus, “Who
sinned – him or his parents?” Jesus replied, “Neither this man nor his parents
sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (John
9:3). Throughout the gospels Jesus lives out a message of grace, which is God’s unconditional love for all people, like
Zacchaeus the tax collector, and the woman caught in the act of adultery at the
beginning of John chapter 8, and even his own friend Peter, who denied him
three times. In each case, instead of sending trouble on the sinner to punish
them, Jesus is reaching out to them with the message of God’s steadfast love,
and is calling them to come home to a God who is more than ready to welcome
them.

Psalm 130 is
one of those places in the Old Testament where we catch a glimpse of this truth
as well. Let’s explore it together. I’m going to use the pew Bibles, the NRSV
translation, rather than the BAS which we prayed a few minutes ago, because
there’s one word that I think is translated much better in the NRSV; I’ll point
it out when we get to it!

So let’s start
by asking ourselves, what is the writer of this psalm experiencing? Look at
verses 1-2:

Out of the
depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to
the voice of my supplications!

The ‘depths’
are a common Old Testament metaphor for suffering, despair, and depression. The
writer is talking about the ocean depths, or maybe the floods: ‘Lord, I’m
drowning in despair here!’ There’s another example of it in Psalm 69 where we
read these words:

Save me, O
God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there
is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. I
am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting
for my God (Psalm 69:1-3).

Our readings
for today give us examples of these depths. In our first lesson, David is
crying out to God in grief for his dear friend Jonathan, who has been killed in
battle with the Philistines. Grief, we know, is one of the hardest things we go
through as humans – the death of someone we love, and the continual experience
of their absence, is something we never really get over. And of course, the
more we loved them, the harder it is to deal with.

In our gospel
one of the characters in the story is going to deal with that as well. Jairus
has a little daughter, and he’s frantic with worry about her; she’s very ill,
and indeed is at the point of death. The serious illness of a much-loved child
is one of the great fears of all parents, isn’t it? And if you’ve lost a child,
you know how black those particular depths can be.

There’s also a
woman who has been suffering hemorrhages for twelve years; she’s spent a lot of
money on doctors, and we can guess that she’s prayed a lot too, but nothing has
changed. Twelve years is the age of Jairus’ little girl; all the time that
Jairus and his family have been enjoying their dear daughter, this woman has
been suffering, and there has been no relief. A long, chronic illness, and years
of unanswered prayer: that’s a very, very dark valley.

In 2
Corinthians 8 there are hints of another dark valley. Paul is organizing a
relief fund in all his Gentile churches to help the Christians back in
Jerusalem, who for some reason are going through a time of severe economic
hardship. Very few of us have to deal with that sort of thing; even if we’ve
been out of work for a while, we usually haven’t had to worry about where our
next meal is coming from. But of course, there are people in the world who are
overwhelmed with worry about that; they have no idea whether or not they’ll be
able to eat today.

So these are
some of the ‘depths’ that Bible people experienced – bereavement, chronic
illness, unanswered prayer, crushing poverty. They are with us still, of
course, along with many other hard circumstances that threaten to overwhelm us.

I wonder what
‘depths’ you have experienced, that have led you to cry out to God in fear or
desperation? Maybe it was the depths of grief at the loss of a loved one, or
maybe it was panic when you found yourself in serious financial difficulties,
or maybe lost a job that you were depending on. Maybe it was the pain of the
breakup of a marriage, or conflict with children or parents. Maybe it was the
unexpected diagnosis of a serious illness. Or maybe it was a sense of guilt at some
things you had done, and a fear that God had turned his back on you and
abandoned you.

These are all
common human experiences; we all go through them, whether we’re Christian or
not. Sometimes it’s harder for us as Christians, because we’ve been told that
if we follow Christ, God will always bless us and look after us. So we find
ourselves asking, “Have I done something wrong that he’s punishing me for?” Or
again, we’ve been taught that we’ll always be joyful if the Holy Spirit lives
in us, and now we’re not feeling that joy.

So how does the
writer of Psalm 130 deal with this experience? What does he have to say to God?
Where does he find hope in the midst of despair? Let me point out a few things
to you.

First, the
writer arrives at what seems to us to be a blindingly obvious conclusion, but
it’s surprising how many people don’t seem to get there without some help.
What’s the conclusion? Simply this: If
God was sending thunderbolts to strike sinners dead, there’d be no one left
standing. Look at verses 3-4:

If you, O Yahweh,
should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with
you, so that you may be revered.

Of course, we
tend to think of ‘sinners’ as being people who are guilty of some particularly
heinous sin. What we classify as a ‘heinous’ sin, of course, changes with our
culture. To some people, it’s anything to do with sex; to others, it’s anything
to do with social injustice. In the Middle Ages, it was daring to charge
interest when you lent money to anyone!

But we
Christians can’t be so selective in our definition of sin, can we? In most of
our services we confess our sins together, saying “We have not loved you with
our whole heart, and we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves”. This, of
course, is based on Jesus’ two great commandments: love the Lord your God with
all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.
If we’ve neglected to do this, then we are sinners. And as soon as you start
defining sin to include the good things we don’t
do, then we know we’re all nailed! As Paul says in Romans 3, ‘All have sinned and fall short of the
glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the
redemption that is in Christ Jesus’ – which is pretty much a New Testament
Christian way of saying exactly what our psalm writer said.

So that’s the
first thing the writer reflects on: everyone
is a sinner, so whatever else my troubles might be, they can’t be God’s
punishment for my sins, because if they were, everyone would be going through
the same punishment. The writer then goes on to reflect on three aspects of
God’s character that give us hope.

First, God is a God of forgiveness. Verse 4
says, ‘But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered’. The
wording seems a little strange to us, but if we read the psalm as a whole, we
can see that this ‘with you’ language is the writer’s way of pointing out different
aspects of God’s character; he might say ‘there is courage with you’ or ‘there
is patience with you’. So in verse 4 we have ‘forgiveness’, and in verse 7 we
read ‘For with the Lord there is
steadfast love, and with him is great
power to redeem’. And these three ‘with you’ characteristics turn out to be just the things that give us hope in our
despair.

So – first,
forgiveness. We who follow Jesus, of course, don’t need to be in doubt about
that. Over and over, Jesus met people who were in despair over their guilt and
assured them of God’s forgiveness. He reached out to people who were considered
to be the worst sinners, to the point that he was even described by his enemies
as the ‘friend of sinners’ (hint: they didn’t think that was a compliment!). He
taught us that God is like the father who welcomes the prodigal son home after
he’s wasted all his property, or like a king who forgives an embezzling servant
a debt bigger than the entire revenue of the kingdom. Paul says, ‘The saying is
sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to
save sinners’ (1 Timothy 1:15). ‘There is forgiveness
with you, so that you may be revered’.

Secondly, God is a God of steadfast love. This is
why I like the NRSV better than the BAS translation of this psalm. The BAS
says, ‘for with the Lord there is mercy’; the NIV says ‘for with the Lord there
is unfailing love’, which is a little better. The Hebrew word is ‘chesed’,
which I think means ‘love with muscles attached to it’, ‘stubborn love’, ‘love
that never gives up’. And so the NRSV has this wonderful phrase, ‘steadfast
love’.

What’s it
telling us? It’s saying that God has made a covenant
with us that he will not break. In that covenant, he has adopted us as his
children, forgiven our sins, given us the gift of the Holy Spirit, and promised
that nothing can ever separate us from his love. His love for us is patient,
stubborn, steadfast and sure, and we can count on it. His love will never let
us go. Never.

So God is a
God of forgiveness, and God is a God of steadfast love. Thirdly, God is a God who comes to the rescue.
The NRSV uses the old word ‘redeem’; it says in verses 7-8, ‘…and with him is
great power to redeem. It is he who will redeem Israel from all its
iniquities’.

The word
‘redeem’ is often used in the Bible to mean paying a price to set slaves free,
or rescue them. But it’s also used in a military sense: God rescuing his people
from a hopeless situation by what the Bible calls ‘the strength of his right
hand’. Our psalm writer asks the question ‘What enemies are too strong for me
to defeat all by myself?’ and comes up with the surprising answer, ‘My sins’:

‘…with
(Yahweh) there is great power to redeem.

It is he who
will redeem Israel from all its iniquities’ (vv.7b-8).

Yes, our own
sins, or ‘iniquities’ as the psalm calls them, can be our worst enemies. How
many times have we made New Year’s resolutions about dealing with our bad
habits, and how many times have we broken them? And, on a less humorous note,
how many times have we said of someone, “He’s his own worst enemy?” Positive
change is very, very difficult for us humans; if eternal life is a reward for
good behaviour, we’re in a desperate situation indeed.

So once again,
we’re back to forgiveness. Jesus says in Mark’s gospel, ‘For the Son of Man
came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’
(Mark 10:45). In the original language, the word ‘ransom’ comes from the same
root as ‘redeem’ or ‘redemption’. Jesus is using the illustration of the slave
market: we are slaves of evil and sin, but he’s given himself on the cross to
ransom us from slavery, so that we can be forgiven and go free.

We’ve seen
that God is a God of forgiveness, a God of steadfast love, and a God who
rescues us from our sins. What’s the conclusion? The conclusion is two words:
‘Hope’, and ‘wait’. Look at verses 5-6:

I wait
for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits
for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who
watch for the morning.

This is honest
and realistic; the writer isn’t promising that the answer to our prayers is
going to come instantly. Whatever this ‘flood’ is that’s threatening to
overwhelm him, he’s not expecting that God will instantly taking it away. Far
from it: he’s expecting to have to wait.

And this lines
up very much with life as I experience it. My Dad told me once, “I’ve been
impatient all my life, so every time I’ve really wanted something, the Lord has
made me wait for it!” And I remember that in Luke’s gospel Jesus tells us a
parable to encourage us ‘to pray always and not to lose heart’ (Luke 18:1);
there would have been no need for him to tell that parable if we always got
everything we asked for right away!

So – keep on
praying, and don’t lose heart. ‘I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his
word I hope’. Whatever trouble we’re going through, let’s keep bringing it to
God in prayer, confident that God is not punishing us, because he’s a God of
forgiveness and steadfast love. This trouble we’re going through isn’t a big
stick he’s using to beat us up or punish us. Rather, he’s walking through our
dark place with us, just as he came and lived and died as one of us in Jesus,
experiencing all the trouble that we go through as human beings, all the way to
death on a cross. So we can come to him with confidence, knowing that nothing
can ever change his steadfast love for us.

As we finish,
why don’t you put your own name in the last two verses of this psalm? ‘O Tim,
hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him there
is great power to redeem. It is he who will redeem me from all my iniquities’. Amen.

Holiday
Bulletins! Summer is a time we like to
travel, whether nearby or in a far off land. We encourage you to bring back a
bulletin from whatever church you attend on your travels and post it on our
“Holiday Bulletin” board.

It is our pleasure to announce that Bishop Jane
Alexander intends, God willing, to ordain the Rev. Heather Liddell and the Rev.
Scott Sharman to the Priesthood and John Gee, Sally Harrison and Dan Wold to
the Vocational Diaconate and to induct the Rev.
Tim Chesterton as Warden of Lay Evangelists.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

This past couple of weeks there
has been a flurry of articles in British newspapers about the future of the
church in Britain. This future is being predicted, of course, by projecting
current trends forward a few years. Every ten years in the UK there is a
census, and each time the census is taken, the number of Christians drops.
Between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians in the UK fell by 5.3 million –
about ten thousand a week. As the statisticians pointed out, if that rate of
decline continues, Christianity in Britain will become extinct in 2067.

Even in the USA, which is a lot
more religious than Britain, the statistics are not encouraging. The Pew Forum
recently published a survey indicating that the percentage of the US population
calling itself Christian fell from 78.4% to 70.6% between 2007 and 2014. In
other words, in a period of only seven years, the size of the professed
Christian population in the USA fell by 10%. In Canada also, all the signs seem
to indicate that an increasing percentage of the population identifies itself
as having ‘no religion’.

I think we’ve all noticed this. Simple
observation tells us that many – perhaps most – churches are graying, and even
young people who come to church aren’t coming as often as their parents and
grandparents did. Those who want to attend church on Sundays and to practice
the teaching of Jesus during the week are now swimming against the stream. And
a huge part of our population has no connection with organized Christianity at
all. At one time we Christians felt like we had real power and influence in the
land; now, for the most part, we do not. It’s easy for us to be fearful, as if
a great giant has appeared on the scene and is advancing menacingly toward us.
There’s nowhere to hide. There’s no escape. The end is nigh.

What’s all this got to do with
David and Goliath? Well, let’s continue.

The Philistines were originally from
Crete; they were a seafaring nation of battle-hardened warriors. They first
appear in the Bible in the Book of Judges, living in an area of Palestine
roughly equivalent to the modern-day Gaza strip. They had a huge tactical
advantage over Israel in that they had iron before the Israelites did, and iron
wins out over bronze almost every time.

In the second half of the
eleventh century BC the Philistines were pushing east, threatening the
territory of the tribes of Israel. This threat was a huge part of the reason
why the Israelites asked the prophet Samuel to give them a king to lead them in
battle. When Saul took on the kingship, this was part of his job description:
do something about the Philistines, please! But it turned out to be a difficult
proposition.

Last week we read of how Saul’s disobedience
led God to reject him as king of Israel. Instead, God sent Samuel to Bethlehem to
anoint David, the youngest son of Jesse, to be king in Saul’s place. But David
was a shepherd boy, and it would be a long time before he succeeded to Saul’s
throne. For now, Saul was still king, so he was the one who led the armies of
Israel to the Valley of Elah to do battle with the Philistines. The Elah is actually
a wadi that is dry for a lot of the year. On either side of the valley are
wooded hillsides, and the two armies took up their positions on opposing
hillsides. Of course, neither wanted to come down and put themselves at a
tactical disadvantage by having to cross the valley and attack uphill.

And so Goliath makes his
appearance. The book of 1 Samuel is a little unclear as to just how tall he was;
the Hebrew manuscripts say ‘six cubits and a span’, which is about nine and a
half feet, but the Greek translation of the Bible, which may have worked from even
earlier manuscripts, says ‘four cubits and a span’, about six foot nine, which
may be more realistic. He came out to challenge the Israelites to single
combat, a common practice in the ancient world; heavy bloodshed would be
avoided by each side choosing a fierce warrior and letting them duke it out.

Ancient armies were made up of
three types of troops: cavalry and chariots, infantry, and projectile warriors
– that is, archers and slingers). Goliath was a heavy infantryman, and when he
issued his challenge, he obviously expected to be met by another heavy infantryman.
Certainly that was what he had prepared for. He wore chain mail made of bronze;
it weighed about a hundred and twenty-five pounds, and it covered his body and
his arms and reached down to his knees. He had bronze greaves protecting the
front of his shins, and a heavy metal helmet, and he carried three separate
weapons: a javelin made of bronze, which he would throw with great force at an
enemy, a sword, and a short range spear with a thick shaft and a cord attached
to it so that it could be retrieved and used again. It had a sharp tip made of
iron weighing about fifteen pounds. Truly, Goliath was a terrifying figure; no
one in the Israelite army dared to take him on.

‘The
Israelites said, “Have you seen this man who has come up? Surely he has come up
to defy Israel. The king will greatly enrich the man who kills him, and will
give him his daughter and make his family free in Israel”’ (1 Samuel 17:25).

But no inducement seems to be
sufficient. Reasonably enough, Saul’s soldiers are probably thinking, “The reward
sounds pretty good, but I’d have to survive the battle to collect it! And what
are the odds of that?”

Interestingly enough, until this
point in the story no one has mentioned the name of God. But a change comes in
verse 24, when a new voice is heard, asking a vital question: “For who is this
uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”
This is the voice of little David, the shepherd boy, the youngest son of Jesse
of Bethlehem, who has turned up at the battle to bring food for his brothers.

David is different; he’s not
afraid. Why not? Well, it seems to me that there are two reasons.

First, David lives his life on the basis that God is real. He’s actually
willing to stake his life on that reality. He’s like Peter when Jesus called
him to step out of the boat and walk in the water toward him. That act made no
sense at all - unless God is real, and is able to do amazing things in the real
world.

This is the faith that David has.
Saul thinks he’s foolhardy: “You’re just a boy”, he says, “and he’s been a
warrior for years. ” But David won’t back down:

“Your servant
used to keep sheep for his father; and whenever a lion or a bear came, and took
a lamb from the flock, I went after it and struck it down, rescuing the lamb
from its mouth; and if it turned against me, I would catch it by the jaw,
strike it down, and kill it…Yahweh, who saved me from the paw of the lion and
from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine”
(vv.34-35, 37).

And later on, as he’s advancing
into battle against Goliath, David says,

“I come to you
in the name of Yahweh of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have
defied…so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that
all this assembly may know that Yahweh does not save by sword and spear; for
the battle is Yahweh’s, and he will give you into our hand” (vv.45-47,
excerpts).

David isn’t afraid, because he
believes that God is real, and that God cares enough to intervene. A thousand
years later, Jesus believed the same thing. None of the ruling powers were very
happy about him, but Jesus walked through the land acting in faith that God was
real, and that God cared enough to intervene. And so the sick were healed, the
lepers were cleansed, the dead were raised, and the good news spread like
wildfire: the kingdom of God is at hand! Even after the powers that be killed him,
God raised him from the dead, and he sent out his defenceless messengers all
over the ancient world. Wherever they went, they announced the good news that
love is stronger than death, and that God has appointed a new king over the
world, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of Israel and the Lord of all. Of course,
we know the story, and it all seems believable for us today, but at the time it
seemed anything but: the little carpenter from Nazareth, leading a kingdom of
God movement! Rome would make short work of him!

But Jesus was not afraid, as
David was not afraid, because he believed that ‘there is a God in Israel’. And I
wonder if that’s part of our problem today? That even though we say we believe in God, we’re not willing
to step out in faith and stake everything on him? We need a human plan, a
training course, a healthy budget – anything but staking absolutely everything on God, and God’s power to change the world.

But there was a second reason why
David wasn’t afraid, and that was because he
wasn’t planning to let Goliath tell him how the battle should be fought.
Goliath was a heavy infantryman, and he challenged the Israelite army to send
him a heavy infantryman to engage in single combat. That was what Goliath was
armed for, and Saul tried to prepare David to fight him on those terms, by
giving him his armour. But David wouldn’t take it; “I can’t wear this stuff!
I’m not used to it”.

No – David was a slinger, a
projectile warrior. Malcolm Gladwell explains this:

‘Slingers had
a leather pouch attached on two sides by a long strand of rope. They would put
a rock or a lead ball into the pouch, swing it around in increasingly wider and
faster circles, and then release one end of the rope, hurling the rock forward.
Slinging took an extraordinary amount of skill and practice. But in experienced
hands, the sling was a devastating weapon…An experienced slinger could kill or
seriously injure a target at a distance of up to two hundred yards’.[i]

Gladwell goes on to cite a recent
study by a ballistics expert with the Israeli defence force. He calculated that
a typical stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of thirty-five metres
would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of thirty-four metres per second
– more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him unconscious or dead.

This was David’s plan. Instead of
fighting Goliath on his own terms – size, strength, conventional weapons – he
was going to run fast, choose his ground, and use the weapon he was confident
in, the one he knew could strike with deadly accuracy far beyond the range of
Goliath’s weapons. And that’s exactly what happened.

And maybe there’s a message for
us here too, in this strange new world in which we find ourselves, when the
church seems to be staring extinction in the face. Christians of my age grew up
in a world of big: big buildings,
splendid cathedrals, big organizations, established procedures. In England,
where I grew up, the Church of England is the established church, integrated
with the systems of government. Here in Canada, when our General Synod meets,
we continue to pass motions calling on governments to do this and that, as if
governments actually care a hoot about what the Anglican Church of Canada
thinks.

You see, we’re still used to big; we find it reassuring. But maybe ‘big’
isn’t what’s called for today. Goliath was big and well protected, but he was also
slow and inflexible, and that slowness and inflexibility cost him his life when
David took out his sling and stone. And maybe today it’s the nimbleness and
speed and flexibility of David that we need.

And we also need David’s absolute
confidence in the weapon in his hands, even if pacifists like me might be a
little uncomfortable in this military analogy. David had confidence in his
sling and stone, because he had seen it work many times before. And I would
suggest to you that what we need today is absolute
confidence in the power of the gospel to change people’s lives. The early
Christians had no big administrative structures, no cathedrals, no seminaries
to train apostles. What they had was a message that they called the good news.
People heard it, believed it, and committed themselves to it, and when they did
that, their lives were transformed. It was like moving from darkness to light,
they said; it was like being born again; it was like being raised from the
dead.

Those of you who follow Reed
Fleming’s blog may have read this story on Friday:

I had the most extraordinary experience this week. Linda and I attended
the AGM for…a women’s ministry in Saint John. There in the front row was
someone I didn’t recognize. She was beautifully dressed and seated next to a
young man who was obviously smitten with her. It turned out he was her fiancée.
I did notice a tattoo, which was reminiscent, but I could not figure out where
I had seen it. This young woman was the key speaker at the meeting. As she
was introduced my jaw dropped…this was Holly!

I met Holly over three years ago. She was a hilariously funny and very
creative person with a terrible drug addiction, which was obviously killing
her. At the time I met her I was working closely with my friend Catherine.
Catherine was an outreach worker at our church. She became a great friend and
support to Holly and it seemed for a while that there might be hope in Holly’s
dark world. Just about that time Catherine’s employment came to an abrupt halt
and we lost track of Holly. The last glimpse of her I had was as she was
standing on a street corner. She was selling her terribly thin body in order to
buy more drugs. After that I didn’t see her. I assumed that she had probably
died in some crack-shack.

I remember feeling upset that we should be brought into her life and
then because of a decision by others, lose that entrée. I did not know that God
had a bigger plan than I saw. A local women’s addiction centre sent Holly to a
treatment centre where she ‘got clean’ and more importantly found Jesus!

I did not recognize the no longer rail thin young woman. As she spoke
she gave credit to Jesus that now she was clean, reunited with her children, no
longer living on the streets but living in a house. She has a young man who is
also a Jesus follower and she has a future!...

I was upset
when Holly was no longer in our orbit, (but) God has his ways which are higher
than mine. Holly’s story will keep me going for a long time. I know others in
very similar circumstances and I pray “God what you have done, do again.
Nothing is impossible for you.”

This is the power of the Gospel
to change people’s lives. As we share our faith confidently with others, we
will see it happen, and the more we see it happen, the more our confidence will
grow.

So, brothers and sisters, let’s
not be afraid of Goliath. Despite statistics, the church does not need to die -
but it may need to change beyond our imagination. Like David, we need to learn
to walk out into the world in the confidence that God is real, and that God
cares enough to do amazing things. We need the courage to abandon our
fascination with ‘big’ and ‘strong’ and embrace ‘small’ and ‘flexible’, as
Jesus and the early church did. And we need to recover our confidence that the
Gospel of Jesus is really good news and that it has the power to change
people’s lives. Truly, as David said, there is a God in Israel – and in the
whole world – and if we are running with him, we do not need to be afraid.